LAFI 2019 : Languages for Inference (formerly PPS)

Inference concerns re-calibrating program parameters based on observed data, and has gained wide traction in machine learning and data science. Inference can be driven by probabilistic analysis and simulation, and through back-propagation and differentiation. Languages for inference offer built-in support for expressing probabilistic models and inference methods as programs, to ease reasoning, use, and reuse. The recent rise of practical implementations as well as research activity in inference-based programming has renewed the need for semantics to help us share insights and innovations.

This workshop aims to bring programming-language and machine-learning researchers together to advance all aspects of languages for inference. Topics include but are not limited to:

This year we are explicitly expanding the focus of the workshop from statistical probabilistic programming to encompass differentiable programming for statistical machine learning.

We expect this workshop to be informal, and our goal is to foster collaboration and establish common ground. Thus, the proceedings will not be a formal or archival publication, and we expect to spend only a portion of the workshop day on traditional research talks. Nevertheless, as a concrete basis for fruitful discussions, we call for extended abstracts describing specific and ideally ongoing work on probabilistic programming languages, semantics, and systems.